Fringe Benefits

There are advantages to keeping your passport safely tucked around your goolies. I don’t actually do that anymore but I used to, and it has aged the document in a certain way.


I grew up in an era of travel where all foreigners, even in their own home, were hopeless miscreants and were going to rip you off as soon as you ambled off an aeroplane, up to a cab and said, “Par Lez Voos Portonesian?”


I also developed some of my travelling habits in an era where you couldn’t just go to an ATM. You had all your freakin cash for a jaunt through the malaria territories, on you. Money belt technology was the most interesting travel topic there was. One of the subsets being, “How good is it to sleep in?” (It’s just not a challenge anymore. In Ho Chi Minh City there’s an ANZ bank two blocks down. I swear, one of the tellers looked familiar.)


Sure, not all of this paranoia is ill-founded. If your hobbies are falling down drunk in a third-world kidnapping hotspot, then I guess you do stand a chance of losing your kit. I don’t tend to do that and also load my personal chattels in sensible, hard to pilfer ways because of the afore mentioned formative influences.


So, my passport has done a bit of time secreted around some of the more humid regions of my person and it has aged it. The fabric of the cover is fraying around the edges. It gives it a romantic, well travelled, designer-tattered look. Up until yesterday, I wasn’t so pleased with that. (It also doesn’t scan that well anymore.)


Yesterday, at HCMC International Airport, I got into a ‘as you land, pre-approved, won’t take more than 15 minutes, visa’ thing. (And before you start, I didn’t have any choice in that.)


An hour into the 15 minute wait for my passport to be stamped with the visa, the badly organised team of American hippies ahead of me seemed to finally get their act together. After they had found the lost envelope of money (in the toilet), the missing passport (it wasn’t missing, it was the person who was missing*), and started to make their way en-masse to customs and freedom, I noticed the familiar fringed-edge of a saggy Australian passport, disappearing into the group’s travel-document bag.


If it hadn’t stood out like Jeannie Little in a one-piece at nippers, I wouldn’t have noticed it and Uncle Sam’s latest charm offensive in Indochina would have disappeared into the night, leaving me massaging my gentleman’s area and explaining to the local immigration that, “It’s the last place I can look. It was around here somewhere, I swear.”

*Turns out, you can't find a passport by just standing there and shouting the persons name.